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Elsewhere opens Danceworks’ new season

Sometimes you don’t fully grasp what it is you’ve been doing until someone else points it out. That’s what happened to Toronto dancer/choreographer Heidi Strauss. The course of inquiry prompted by this external observation has now matured into a work called elsewhere that opens Danceworks’ new season this week at Harbourfront Centre.

From 2008 to 2012, Strauss was Factory Theatre’s first dance artist-in-residence. In that context, the Dora Award winner made three evening-length works. After a particular performance, an audience member alerted Strauss to certain aspects she’d noticed in the choreographer’s work and steered her toward a burgeoning field of psychological investigation known as affect theory.

As Strauss began to read the literature she came to realize that the ideas she was encountering related strongly to her own artistic ideals and practice, in a way made sense of them.

“I realize now that affect has been present in a lot of my work,” says Strauss.

At the risk of gross over-simplification, affect theory may be said to deal with hard-wired physical responses to emotions or feelings. In their physical manifestation, these responses betray what’s going on inside long before we’ve become consciously aware of them. For example, tears well up before we say to ourselves, “I’m sad.” A smile breaks out before we realize we’re feeling happy. Equally, the experiences we accumulate can govern our behaviour and interactions in a visceral way we do not always fully understand.

As Strauss puts it: “Affect theory is a way of reading behaviour.”

But how does a choreographer translate this into a dance? As Strauss explains it, she has no intention of even trying; elsewhere is not animated theory. You don’t have to have read anything to relate to the piece, although Strauss says some spoken text early in the work “establishes ideas around the piece.”

“I don’t want to be shutting the door on people who might be coming to dance for the first time. In fact, I want to open things up.”

ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

That said, the new knowledge Strauss acquired in the lengthy development of elsewhere certainly informed the way it looks.

Strauss grew up in Sudbury. Her early dance training was mostly in ballet, although by her late teens she’d decided her future was in modern/contemporary dance. She moved south to further her education at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, graduating in 1994.

Strauss soon became known for the intensity and power of her dancing, then for the raw authenticity of her choreography. However, Strauss has decided to sit this one out as a dancer.

“I decided not to be in it,” she says. “I don’t have the capacity to do both.”

Instead, Strauss has committed her latest work to a carefully selected cast of three women and two men: Danielle Baskerville, Miriah Brennan, Luke Garwood, Molly Johnson and Brendan Wyatt. All are well-seasoned dancers with the ability, as Strauss describes it, “to inhabit what they’re doing.”

Her cast, as it happens, all come from different places, which prompted the title, elsewhere. The 60-minute work, structured in solos and various groupings, is not conventionally narrative, though audience members will find different emotional resonances in the piece. It is, after all, very much about humanity, about ourselves.

Unusually in the ephemeral world of contemporary dance, elsewhere is already guaranteed a life beyond its Toronto debut. In October it will tour to Montreal, Oakville and Peterborough.

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